Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their teens, tend to notice an endearing vagueness on the part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when it comes to details. There is Watson’s old war wound, for instance, which journeys absent mindedly between shoulder and leg. And there is Doyle’s inability to remember dates or even his own characters’ names. In ‘The Creeping Man’ the client, Trevor Bennett, is met by his fiancée with a gushing, ‘Oh, Jack, I have been so dreadfully frightened.’(Watson himself has form here. In ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ his wife calls him James and he does not find it odd, even though his name is John.)
Part of the reason is that Doyle was simply less bothered about Holmes and Watson than we are. He considered the duo a trivial distraction from the real business of penning historical novels, and even went to the trouble of killing Holmes before financial circumstances compelled him to resurrect him. In ‘The Empty House’, the opening story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), a thunderstruck Watson discovers that, instead of dying in a fall that also killed his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, Holmes escaped and went into hiding for three years. It’s a good story, but Holmes’s explanations are so illogical that many writers have attempted more plausible ones.
Anthony Horowitz’s new novel is founded, like so many others, on the idea that the official version of the events that took place at the seething edge of the Reichenbach Falls is plain wrong. Unlike other books, it does not focus on Holmes or Watson, neither of whom feature at all. Instead, as the title suggests, the presiding figure in this tale is the man Holmes dubbed ‘the Napoleon of crime’.
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